by John Pearce, author of Last Stop: Paris and Treasure of Saint-Lazare

No onecould be happier than I that Doris-Maria Heilmann has published an author’s road map to sales success, “Book Marketing on a Shoestring.” Her advice for the marketing of my novel “Treasure of Saint-Lazare” helped it reach #39 on the all-Kindle best-seller list and in being chosen the best historical mystery of 2014 by the Readers’ Favorite book-review site. If you’re about to publish either fiction or non-fiction, read this book.

If you’ve ever been among her clients, you know already that Doris is the source of an endless river of ideas. As she points out very early in the book, her advice is for every type of author, from the traditionally published (who still don’t get much publisher support and virtually no budget at all) to the hobby writer. She will certainly be involved in marketing my sequel, “Last Stop: Paris.” The manuscript is going through its second round of editing and the cover is being designed.

“It all adds up to this fact,” she writes. “No matter how you publish, or plan to publish, it is up to you, the author, to market your book.”

“Book Marketing on a Shoestring” goes on sale Monday on Amazon and elsewhere. I strongly suggest you take a look at it. Take advantage of her 30 years of experience in the book world.

It’s both a narrative and a reference book

Doris helps authors as a consultant. She throws out ideas and suggestions and leaves her clients the responsibility for choosing which ones to implement.

This book is absolutely full of them, and one of its best points is its structure.

First, it’s a narrative of book marketing, assembled from hundreds of ideas and suggestions she’s made over the years.

Second, and perhaps more important over the long run, it’s a reference book. The iBook version she provided for my review has a matchless table of contents that makes it easy to find any or all of the topics she covers.

Of course, ebooks being ebooks, she loaded the text with links, both to her own blogs and to outside information. You could market your book using her material alone, although there are many other good marketing information sources out there. (There are also a lot of bad ones, several of which I ran across — and paid money to — in the process of marketing “Treasure of Saint-Lazare. Needless to say, that won’t happen when I begin marketing “Last Stop: Paris,” which should be published in six months or so.)

Here are the best places to find Doris. In addition, she’s active in social media.